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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

This is why, for earning money, you should participate in positive sum games like the real economy. Poker is worse than 0 sum, its negative sum.

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Perhaps in a casino taking a rake. But if you're playing w/ friends? The good times make it positive sum. Even in a casino, the players can be getting enough utility / enjoyment out of the game that it's positive sum.

Yes you are right but “pros” are playing with rake typically.

In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose

the sum here is the sum of wins or losses across all players. for you to win, someone else has to lose. in an economy everyone can be a winner.

Care to elaborate on how the real economy is positive sum and poker is negative sum?

Poker has a rake and the amount of wealth in the system is the money people put on the table (not even factoring in that gambling winnings are taxed). Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum. You can combine pieces of metal into new alloys and machinery which are more valuable than the sum of their parts. This is positive sum. If two people trade they only engage in trade if the transaction is mutually beneficial.

What do you think two poker players still in a hand raising each other are doing? They both still think it’s mutually beneficial. The maths if you have full visibility show it isn’t, but I’d argue that’s the same of the “real” economy too. In the latter example we can point to long-standing increasing income and wealth inequality as a proxy for the house rake at poker.

When two people are continually raising eachother in a poker game they are doing it because there is an probability of winning the pot. It remains zero sum.

edit: The economy being positive sum has nothing to do with the way wealth is distributed.

When is down to two, it's zero-sum.

Income inequality does not imply zero-sum.

If you think the economy is zero-sum how do you explain that there is plainly more wealth now than there was 200 years ago?

Is there? In real terms once adjusted for inflation? Or is it just distributed differently?

I don't quite follow this. Surely each poker player who raises thinks that they will take the pot and the other players will lose. So they don't each think that the raise is mutually beneficial. Player A thinks that the raise is beneficial for player A and detrimental for player B, and player B thinks that their call is beneficial to player B and detrimental to player A. Which seems like the definition of 0 sum.

Compare this to something like trading apples and oranges, where one person gets an orange (maybe they are tired of apples) and the other gets an apple (maybe they are tired of oranges). Both gets something they want in exchange for something they don't want.

A simpler way to put it is poker is a win/lose game, while markets are win/win.

Taxes are the rake in the economy.

And yet, the total wealth goes up over time.

That's only the case if you want to pave your own roads and dig your own well.

This "mutually beneficial" goes often unappreciated or un-noticed. But it's key. Yes, at the limit, nobody forces the poker players to keep playing - they both want to keep playing. Sure. But in economic exchanges, all parties can be growing together. And growing faster the more they work together. All while the economy as a whole is usually also growing. There are parasitic organizations and individuals attached and sucking blood: And the economy can still grow for all the other participants. Within reason on the blood sucking.

> Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum.

I get the sense that you are dismissing the value of entertainment in this exchange.

Many of the donators in a given player pool know that they are losers and have a rough budget of what they are willing to lose. They engage in the exchange because they value the entertainment.

I personally see poker games as a transfer of wealth from worse players to better players, with the house taking a cut for creating the market. At higher stakes where most solid pros play, this rake is a small percentage of the wealth transfer.

Note that for many of the losing players, substitute activities for poker are gambling in the pit and/or sports betting. Are these also not part of the economy? What about movies, concerts, and TV? There is value in creating experiences instead of creating things, and poker is an experience that some people like.

To be fair, one of the things that poker is good at is letting people believe they are winners when they are not — this facilitation self-delusion sometimes makes for a bad look. That said, the bank account doesn’t lie, and I’ve seen plenty of avid poker players quit or drop stakes dramatically while choosing a different hobby or form of entertainment.

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